


The Gap Year

by apollos



Category: South Park
Genre: College, F/M, Freedom, Metaphors, Minor Character Death, Not Going to College, implied depression
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-08
Updated: 2015-01-08
Packaged: 2018-03-06 16:52:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,221
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3141746
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/apollos/pseuds/apollos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A tale of renovations.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Gap Year

As the Valedictorian of South Park High School, Wendy surprises everybody when she gives her graduation speech. Under the weight of her lime green rode and the various cords and other honors strung around her neck, she raises one hand and she says, "I've been accepted to Yale and Princeton and waitlisted at Harvard, but I've decided to take a gap year."

This doesn't affect Kenny's life at first, not really. There is mild surprise rumbling through the crowd; until this moment, everybody had thought and had been told that Wendy would be attending Princeton in the fall, after having her early decision application at Harvard deferred and then waitlisted. Kenny has a loose understanding of these terms, as he did not bother to apply to college and has been working two jobs throughout high school, hoping to quit them both and get a factory job somewhere nearby, work long hours, live at home and live  _for_  home. Sure, a gap year sounds more like something Stan or Craig would do, taking time off to travel, or whatever, but overall, Kenny meets the announcement with a brief raise of his eyebrows. He looks over at Stan, who is a bit farther up the  _M_  row, and sees that Stan is neutral, wonders if he already knew.

Wendy's decision is the talk of the town, at least according to Kyle. Kenny has been done with high school, with high school people and high school drama, for a long time now. He's isolated himself, keeping in contact with Stan and therefore with Kyle, but otherwise he works, sleeps and renovates his home on the weekend. He doesn't attend the graduation parties, doesn't meet up at Stark's Pond to burn all their school papers in a bonfire (he's saving them for Karen, not for cheating, but so that he may be up to date if she ever comes to him for help, handing her his colormarked versions of  _The Great Gatsby_  and  _A Tale of Two Cities_  if she asks for them, informing her of what those specific teachers look for in essays.) Apart from sparse summer afternoons at Stan's house with fresh lemonade in little paper cups and watermelon staining their tongues, lighting off fireworks and watching Stan smoke weed in the evenings (Kenny can't—drug tests, and it's not worth to kill himself just to restart his system after smoking), Kenny does nothing, just works.

The gap year decision starts to affect Kenny when everybody leaves for college. It's not all at once—some people start early; some people start late. Stan and Kyle take off for some tiny liberal arts school in New England that they've both picked for themselves, Stan with the intention of studying music and education and Kyle mathematics and philosophy, in early September. They're some of the last to leave. And when all the kids Kenny's age have left by mid-September, all but one, he feels both that a weight has been lifted and that he is now immensely alone.

So, he calls Wendy, whose number he has because, well, he has everybody's number. It's a small town.

"Kenny?" She answers on the second ring and sounds surprised.

"Kenny," Kenny says back. He's reclining on a chair in his backyard, which he has spent a hefty amount of time today mowing. His dad having left town and his mom sick with some liver problems, Kenny has—thankfully—taken up the family chores.

"What do you want?" Now she is terse, tired.

"To talk," Kenny says. "We're the only ones left."

"That we are."

"I'd thought you'd travel or something," Kenny says. He's never travelled for fun, not really. "Like, what are you going to do?"

"I—well, Kenny, it's a gap year." Now the tone of her voice is exasperated, and Kenny's getting sort of annoyed with this over the phone connection.

"That doesn't explain anything."

"I don't have to explain myself to you." Feisty. Kenny grins.

"No, I guess you don't." There's a pause; Kenny clears his throat. "Want to meet up and hang out? I have the next two days off work and I was going to do some things around the house, but that can wait."

Another pause. Kenny's heart sinks, just a little, although he doesn't know why, since he cut himself off from everybody on purpose. Wendy doesn't feel as  _high school_  as the other ones did, maybe.

"I'd love to," Wendy says, cutting the silence.

"Cool." Kenny is smiling and feeling his heart skip. "Uh, tomorrow, two, the mall?"

"That's good with me. Bye, then." Wendy hangs up, and Kenny gets the feeling that this conversation was, somehow, hard for her.

His heart slams into a steady beat. Part of separating from everybody involved the lack of a typical high school experience, or whatever that was; the last girlfriend he'd had was in the ninth grade, a junior he tried to woo because he heard she was easy, losing his virginity to her in the backseat of her father's car. He was one of the first boys his age to do so, impressing them all and attracting questions from curious boys and girls who thought of him as wizened now, but the whole thing left him sort of hollow when the junior broke up with him to date some college boy in California long distance. Kenny's slept around with those curious, wide-eyed girls, but mostly he just pours every ounce of himself into this house, this  _home_ , that he's trying to build as if from the ground up. Remembering that, he puts his prepaid cell phone back in his pockets and gets to clearing the junk from the front yard so he can mow some more; he'll take the scrap metal that have somehow found their way onto his yard like crashed satellites to the scrapyard later, collect some more money, every little bit counting.

Tomorrow, at the mall. Kenny is sitting at a sticky food court table and jiggling his leg, unable to stop. He's been watching the main entrance for the last thirty five minutes, having gotten there at one. Wendy walks in, wearing a long lilac summer dress and white leggings, giving Kenny a vivid flash of childhood, of swing sets and single classrooms. She walks with a purpose whether she has one or not and it elates him a little to know that her purpose is seeking him out. They make eye contact and she strides towards him.

"Hey," Kenny says. He springs up to greet her, dissolving some of the energy he's stored up. He feels sort of like he should shake her hand, as if this is some sort of business meeting, a negotiation. "You're early."

"You're earlier." Wendy smiles. It doesn't reach her eyes.

"That I am." Kenny clap his hands together, rubs them.

"So," Wendy says. She pauses. Kenny recognizes the habit, as Kyle has the same one: the debate team has trained them both out of using  _um_ or  _uh_ , causing them to talk until they stop like a cartoon bird running into a wall to collect their thoughts. "What do you want to do?"

"Let's just walk and talk."

Walk and talk they do. The mall is devoid of life, a weekday, teenagers in school, and Kenny kind of wants to take Wendy's hand, knows that that's ridiculous. Wendy makes good company and they talk about light, floating topics: Kenny's jobs, Stan and Kyle and their other classmates, television shows they both watch, music they both listen to, things they observe around the mall. They do not breach, or even come close to breaching, Wendy's decision, what she's going to do with her time. Kenny does not try to force it—she sounds happier than she did over the phone, when they were talking about—or around—it.

They make plans to meet again, this time for lunch a few days down the road at a little family-owned café. Kenny works in the meantime, putting a little aside for this meal, making sure Karen does her homework in between jobs. The day of their lunch, Wendy comes bearing news of Stan.

"He says he likes it up there," she's saying while picking apart a salad. "His only complaint is that he can't room with Kyle because the college prohibits first years dorming with people they already know."

"Typical." Kenny smiles, because it is, and also because what he's treating himself to looks delicious. "That's so Stan. I haven't spoken to him or Kyle. We've all been busy."

"I guess." Melancholy flashes across Wendy's face. Kenny steers the conversation into more inoffensive territory after that. Once again, the café is sparsely populated, and Kenny starts to feel like he's living in a ghost world. It sounds like something that would happen to him, that he'd get stuck on some other existential plane with other lost souls, time moving but no progress being made. When he hears a blare of silence down the road, when he feels a bloom of pain after bumping his knee against the table, when he elicits a smile out of Wendy, he knows that he's among the living, feels the blood his heart is pumping.

Hanging out with Wendy becomes a regular occurrence. When Kenny is not working or renovating the house, he is meeting up with Wendy. They move from neutral meeting grounds, like restaurants and the mall, to privacy in their respective homes. Wendy helps Kenny repair and then repaint the walls in his house, which breaks down into a paint fight, flinging stripes of pastel green at each other and sullying their clothes. Kenny goes to Wendy's and lounges on the chairs on her back patio, sipping fruity drinks as the summer weakens into autumn, thinking about the fireworks he'd let off with Stan. Wendy doesn't like fireworks; something about their use in modern Western culture being a translation, or metaphor, for patriarchal machismo, and this is what they're talking about now, Kenny half-listening and half-remembering. He reaches across the gap between his and Wendy's chair, takes her hand.

"Yeah," is all Wendy says.

Before winter sets well in and after Stan's birthday, which he'd flown back for and they both avoided him, awkwardly, Kenny picks Wendy up in his shitty little car, a hand me down from his mother that she's no longer able to drive. They go to the water tower, stereotypical as it may be, at Kenny's suggestion. It's nighttime, stars blossoming across the sky, the moon strong enough so that they can see well. There's a lot of South Park, a lot of trees, a lot of nothing. They climb the tower; one of Wendy's dainty sandal falls off her feet, tumbling down the steps, and Kenny misses when he reaches an arm out to catch it. She is undeterred, soldiering on, the bare soul of her foot wrapping around the cold bars of the ladder in a way that makes Kenny's stomach twist.

They sit themselves on the little platform outside the water tower, their legs hanging between the bars and off.

"You're going to lose your other shoe," Kenny says, nudging Wendy's shoulder. The other sandal is perched, precarious, off her toes.

Wendy shrugs and kicks it off, lets it fall until they cannot see it anymore. She doesn't turn to him, but as if giving a eulogy to a person she didn't know that well, forlorn yet detached, she asks:

"Are you with me because I'm the only one left?"

Kenny is not surprised by the question. "No."

His answer lets tension seep out of Wendy's shoulders and so she leans against him, head on his shoulder.

"Are you with me because I'm the only one left?" he asks her, more quietly, after some time of staring into the bucolic skyline. It's a worry that didn't occur to him until now—he'd romanticized the idea, sort of, that they drifted to each other among a shipwreck in open, lonely seas. But though the circumstances are forgiving there's something else, something besides a shared desire for contact in self-imposed isolation, which draws them together, he thinks.

"No," Wendy says. More softly, to the point that Kenny doesn't know if he's supposed to hear it or not: "You're the only thing right now that seems normal."

There's a chill and they're both underdressed; they huddle for warmth on the water tower and find constellations in the stars, something they surprise each other with their knowledge of. "Stan taught me," Kenny says, and Wendy laughs, because it turns out that Stan taught her, too. Kenny wonders, vaguely, if Stan and Kyle are huddled together somewhere in New England finding constellations and decides he doesn't care; he pulls Wendy in closer, laughs with her.

The first time they have sex is at eleven o'clock on a Wednesday morning in Wendy's room. Something about the childish quality that lingers in this space breaks Kenny's heart a little, the soft pinks and plush pillows, the ornate whitewood desk and vanity. It's hot and they throw everything off the bed but themselves, taking time, having fun, nowhere to go, nothing to stop them. It is, objectively, not the best sex Kenny has ever had, but it might be the most special, holding a porcelain woman in his arms in her childhood room, kissing the delicate, veined skin of her eyelids.

"You gotta tell me why you took the gap year," Kenny says, after. They're lying in her bed still, naked, their sweat pooling as stains on Wendy's white sheets. When Kenny shuts his eyes the light of day penetrates them, renders it useless, so he keeps them open and set on Wendy. "You know I'm not a gossip. You know I'm not asking to tell. I just feel like I'll never know you if you don't tell me."

Wendy sighs and rolls on her stomach, away from him. A plank of light from the window drapes itself across her back; Kenny can find gold in her skin, in her hair. "Alright," she says with a deep sigh, "I'll tell you.

"There was a lot of pressure on me to apply to all these really prestigious schools, and I thought that was what I wanted, you know. To be a doctor, a lawyer, a scientist—somebody that makes a lot of money in an important STEM field. I've always been passionate about learning and about people and their rights so I thought I'd turn this into an opportunity to help somebody. But I just—I got sick of it, Kenny." She rolls back towards him and rests her head on his chest, looking up at him. "All that pressure, but more—the  _rigidity_  of academia. The snobbishness. I can't stand it. I didn't want to turn into one of those people—one of those  _Kyles_. By the time I realized this it was a month before graduation and I'd missed all the deadlines. I knew I didn't want to go to Princeton— _Princeton_!—but I didn't know what I wanted to do in actuality, either. So I took the gap year." A pause, a weak smile. "Maybe I'll write a novel."

"Very  _The Bell Jar_ ," Kenny says, dragging himself and Wendy up against the headboard, wrapping his arms around her and dropping a kiss to her head. "Honestly, Wendy, that all makes sense to me. I'm not judging you."

"I knew you wouldn't," Wendy says. "But I'm judging myself. Harvard contacted me. A spot opened for me and I didn't take it. I feel like this isn't who I am, but this is the freest I've ever been."

Kenny presses another kiss into her forehead, fierce this time, trying to communicate all of the love that has built up in him for this woman, who was months ago just another lost girl. He can taste her sweat, proud that he's procured this from her. Wendy's eyelids are drooping and there is a sigh that seems to live inside everything she says, but Kenny only hugs her tighter.

"You're so smart, you know," Wendy says after some time of this has passed. "You could've. You could've gone to college. A full ride and everything."

"College isn't for everybody, Wendy."

Kenny keeps his promise and does not tell anybody the real reason Wendy took a gap year, though it isn't scandalous in his opinion. It's sensible. Wendy looks into temporary jobs; Kenny looks into cheap airfare to somewhere exotic, like Panama, Costa Rica, Tahiti, one of those places with names that roll sweet off his tongue though he knows he'll never have enough for a trip like that. When Wendy gets a job at the grocery store as a cashier Kenny takes her on a small road trip to Yellowstone the week before she starts work. It's sort of magical in the way that it feels already like a memory as they're experiencing it, laughing loud and free, observing buffalo and geysers and mountains that loom like gods in the distance. It's cold now and it's hard to feel her heat through their coats when he hugs her, but he does, he swears that he does.

Their classmates come home for Thanksgiving and then Christmas. Kenny sticks to his routine of avoiding everybody, taking extra shifts for the holidays, eating up his coworker's absences; Wendy traipses out to parties and he hears the news, the gossip, from her. "I'm an old scandal now," she says, drawing patterns on Kenny's chest tucked up into him in his bed at one in the morning after Wendy went to a Boxing Day party at Token's house, "they've moved on. Everybody looks at me like I'm this sad little thing and that's it. They don't like to talk about their experiences around me."

"I can't believe we're the only ones that stayed," Kenny says. "Even Clyde, man. Even Clyde went away."

"Clyde went to Colorado State University," Wendy laughs. "That doesn't count."

"Snob," Kenny says. Wendy smacks his chest. Then: "Fuck them, Wendy. Move on yourself."

Wendy lets out a little flutter of a breath, not quite a sigh, and nestles more into Kenny. He turns off the lamp on his bedside cable, grabs for her. They hold each other like they want to become each other, utilizing every inch of contact, and sometimes it makes Kenny's eyes a little wet. He's on the verge of tears tonight, wondering what he'd done to allow himself to have this. He hasn't even died in so long, not since the first semester of senior year, and he feels like he's approaching something akin to normalcy. Like the shore of the sea they're shipwrecked is in sight.

A long and lonely expanse of winter. Kenny's outside renovations stop with the arrival of the snow and he attends more to his mother as her health worsens; she complains that the cold makes her bones hurt like old women do. He and Wendy make snow angels in his yard, sometimes, and afterwards they lay in them and talk in their new morose, morbid way, floundering in their respective ways.

"I think Mom's going to die," Kenny says to Wendy on one of these days, laying in graying snow and staring at the dull sky. "I don't—it will be less of a financial burden, but—Jesus, Wendy—"

"Shh," Wendy says. She reaches across and takes his hand, and he remembers a few months ago when he did this for her, wonders if she felt the same way he does now: comforted, connected, part of something more than himself. "She's your mother, Kenny. You're allowed to grieve."

Grief is a language that Kenny does not speak. He continues to tend to his mother while Karen skitters around the subject, mousy in every way. With their jobs, and with this burden, Kenny and Wendy do not see each other as much in these dead months, and the sole grieving Kenny can accomplish is for her. He thinks of stormy seas, of getting separated and snagged on damp, jagged rocks, and he wraps himself in these fantasies to keep warm while he tends to Carol and Karen alike.

Spring comes and with it, the death of Kenny's mother. It's a drizzly, gray day, and Kenny and Karen are beside her in the hospital bed, both of them holding a frail hand. Karen's eyes are blown into circles with terror, Kenny's narrowed with concentration. He's managed to provide insurance and this feels so important to him, that he can let his mother die in a hospital, at peace.

It's three in the morning and Karen is whispering  _it's okay, Mom, you can let go_  when Carol passes. For the first time in Kenny's life, he feels fully like a man, holding his dead mother's hand and thinking about funeral preparations. He calls Wendy and wakes her around seven in the morning; over the phone, they cry the tears the overcast sky refuses to let lose, mourning anything and everything that can be mourned together, Kenny getting closer as he drives to her house, seeks her out.

She pulls him into a hug at the front door; they're still on the phone with each other, they're still crying. It's so wet with their faces pressed together, Kenny knows he's found her again, no longer adrift and alone in a vast and terrifying stretch of the sea. "God, Kenny," she's saying, holding him. "God."

So, while their classmates of yesteryear return from college for spring break, Kenny goes to a party with Wendy. Stands in the corner and sips from a drink while he watches her flit around. Some of the people of his past look different—Token's pierced an ear, Craig's dyed his hair, Kyle has taken up wearing turtlenecks—but Kenny detects a thread of immaturity in them. He is not envious of them, but he thinks of their coddled lives in their dorm rooms, experiencing some façade of freedom without being free. College is not for everybody; Wendy returns to his side and he wraps his arm around her, whispers in her ear, "Man, college was not for you and me."

Wendy nods, looking serious. "It's like I don't recognize them anymore," she whispers back. "Were they always like this?"

Kenny nods. They watch Clyde begging for somebody to hold him upside down while he drinks from a keg and then leave. Kenny's sold his mother's car and bought a better, though still used and old, one; Wendy has hung a red velvet cupcake air freshener around the rearview mirror, and she's swinging it back and forth on the way to her house, where he'll park in the driveway and chase her up the stairs and into bed, her parents elsewhere inside the dark house. When Wendy turns on the light in her room, Kenny sees that she has changed, too, new lines in her face adding years to his age, and he kisses and licks through every one.

In the summer Kenny gets his precious factory job; Wendy's still cashiering full time. It makes things a little harder, but also a little easier, because Kenny's getting more money to pour into his house and Wendy's starting to look chipper around the edges, like she's realizing something as the sun becomes more prominent in the sky. Wendy gets a little apartment; Kenny christens it with some loud, obnoxious house plant he's read has good atmospheric qualities to loan to the room or whatever. Even when all the college kids settle back into their South Park lives, the renovations on Kenny's house are almost done.

The gap year turns into two, than three, than four, than forever, and people are returning to South Park from college for real as Wendy and Kenny move in with each other. The shadow of the lost girl follows Wendy around, but she does not that deter her. She sets up South Park's first woman center, which gains a reputation that attracts women from other small towns, and finds genuine pleasure in her work at the charity. She takes online classes sometimes, says she maybe wants to get a management degree in the future. Kenny quits the factory job, takes up work as a plant operator in the school system, fixing and cleaning things for a reasonable pay. It's a reasonable life. Karen gets into a prestigious graduate school after completing undergraduate at the University of California in three years and they throw her a grand party at their little house, what was once Kenny's derelict dwellings across the train tracks now a symbol of prosperity. Friends of theirs flock from the places they've moved to, even if that place, like in the case of Stan and Kyle, is just down the street.

A second floor to their house starts sounding like a good idea around the same time they become engaged and Wendy enrolls full-time in an online university for that management degree. Kenny stops recognizing his childhood home in the skeleton of this building, standing with his fists on his hips in the summer, Wendy by his side. He sees only progress. Kenny and Wendy are not the only ones left anymore, no longer adrift at sea, but still they cling to each other.


End file.
